In recent times, a form of a stove primarily designed for domestic use has become popular wherein electrical resistor or gas burner units are mounted in a counter top in the kitchen area of a home or possibly in some commercial installations, which stove has an inlet to a suction means positioned centrally within the burner array and wherein the suction means is designed to remove all of the hot air, steam, grease vapors and other particles and gasses arising from the normal cooking activities. The collected gasses and particles are then conveyed by a suitable duct system to be discharged to the atmosphere. One such popular cooking means is sold under the "Jen-Air" trademark.
For most cooking procedures the arrangement is quite satisfactory, but it has been found, however, when a steak for example is being broiled on such a stove, that while some of the smoke, particles and other fumes are mostly removed from the cooking area, there is a visible as well as an invisible gaseous flow of vaporized grease and possibly other otherwise solid materials that are not pulled into the suction inlet to be discharged. It has become an unpleasant experience to find out that certain of these gasses that are not sucked into the exhaust system and which rise upwardly with the heated air from the burners to hit the ceiling above the stove, are condensed upon and thus deposited on the ceiling above the stove and to some extent on the wall area adjacent the vicinity of the stove, and over a period of time unless such deposits are promptly removed, such deposits cause a perceptible build up of an objectionable layer of a sticky mass to form. Such a layer usually includes a variety of solids including a greasy substance that is not only unsightly but also may ultimately be absorbed into the surface upon which it has been deposited to become a health and also a fire hazard.
While it is known to provide hoods over stoves generally that are connected to exhaust means to remove vapors and objectionable fumes from flowing upwardly from the cooking surfaces of stoves, either for esthetic reasons are otherwise, the providers of the modern counter top type of stoves have not seen fit to provide for the use of such a hood and, in all the conventional designs for counter top stoves, the practice has been to rely upon the use of the down-draft counter top suction inlet mounted in the same horizontal plane as the plane in which the heating elements are mounted, which suction means is designed to be powerful enough to effectively remove all of the unwanted vapors from the several usual domestic or other types of counter-top of cooking operations. As pointed out above, however, for certain cooking procedures such as broiling and grilling for example the suction removal system has not always been found to be completely satisfactory for effecting the removal of all of the gasses, smoke particles, spatter and vapors flowing from the food being cooked.